My Christmas present will arrive late this year but it is none the less very welcome. It weighs five tons, is black and lumpy, smells like a ripe Gorgonzola and is delivered by tractor.

No prizes for guessing I am awaiting the delivery of a load of well-rotted farmyard manure, which commits me to a couple of weeks’ hard labour distributing it around the vegetable garden and across the rose bed and herbaceous border.

For a gardener there could be no better gift than the Real McCoy. Otherwise it is a case of making your own by composting vegetable waste, or resorting to chemical fertilisers.

From the look of my roses last summer, they are desperate for their annual slug of farmyard manure, an invigorating cocktail not only of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium but also variable quantities of other plant foods including manganese, magnesium, iron and boron, elements not always present in chemical fertilisers.

Long before chemicals came to dominate the fertiliser market, gardeners swore by farmyard manure as the antidote for flagging roses and a pick-me-up for the vegetable garden.

A well-maintained rose bush might be capable of surviving forty years but the flowers start to deteriorate after eight if the plants are not fed annually.

The same is true of the herbaceous borders where the plants start life with all the loving attention of a new-born baby, only for paternal diligence to wear a bit thin in later years.

In the perfect world, a gardener should apply fertilisers annually without waiting for deficiencies to appear, by which time the damage has been done. Plants can be affected long before the consequences of neglect – reduced vigour and yield – become obvious.

Soil analysis is one way of determining when fertiliser is needed, except that most gardeners cannot always be expected to administer with the necessary precision what, after all, is a scientific process.

Although plants cannot take up nutrients until they have been broken down into simple substances – which is why chemical fertilisers act faster– bulky organic substances such as farmyard manure and vegetable compost have notable advantages.

Most important of these is that they almost always improve the soil texture, making it more open yet retentive of moisture in dry weather, and easier to work at all times while the activity of micro-organisms is stimulated, accelerating the breakdown of nutrients into simple chemical forms.

Also significant is that plant foods from bulky manure are liberated over a fairly long period, thus ensuring a regular supply of food without serious shortages or excesses.

By contrast, some chemicals are available almost immediately, and unless care is taken with their application, plants can suffer an overdose.

The best results are often to be obtained by a combination of manure/compost and concentrated chemicals, the bulky stuff providing longer-lasting fertiliser and soil improvement, with the chemicals applied to meet the known requirements of your flowers and vegetables – nitrogen for leaf growth, phosphates for roots, and potash for flowers and fruit.

As a rule, the bulky manures are best dug in during autumn or winter, and the chemical fertilisers are best applied as a top dressing in late winter or spring.